Company’s marketing multimedia team storyboarded the required application and selected the specialized hardware but discovered their internal development team could not meet the tight 4-month timeline. By partnering with Digital Mettle, they met the requirement and now own a solution that their internal development team can enhance and maintain.
Goals
- Create a next-gen marketing automation platform using computer vision tech
- Deliver code that aligns with internal client standards and practices
- Turn over all IP and related code to internal team to manage and enhance
Approach
- Conduct interviews with dev team to align with current development parameters
- Create specification document based on current technology investments
- Create, deliver, and support custom software that meets all goals
Technology
- Windows PCs and Servers
- Desktop application written in C# .NET
- Specialized hardware SDK to handle many users on a single device
- Computer vision to enable interactivity between digital and real-word objects
Results
4 month deadline met in 3 months, serving Marketing team at critical tradeshow
Internal development team stayed on roadmap
Customer now has a proprietary marketing automation system that they own and are considering marketing directly
Further phases extended the solutions to multiplatform tablets
Challenge
The Digital Mettle team has worked with this client to produce custom tradeshow and Executive Briefing Center experiences for more than a decade. For their 2013 refresh, the client wanted to go in a drastic new direction. The customer had already selected unique hardware with built-in computer vision and had a goal of interactivity between digital and real-word objects. They needed Digital Mettle to make it happen quickly.
Initial Challenges
The customer’s team responsible for maintaining their library of multimedia was tasked with inventing a new way of presenting for an upcoming trade show. Digital Mettle had worked with this team many times before, but new corporate policy required the team to work with internal IT developers to create any new systems they designed. Due to resource constraints, they could not deliver the system in time and the media team was given special permission to continue to work with their partner of choice. Unfortunately, the delays in the internal process meant the system was behind schedule before it was ever started.
The Customer’s Vision
Specialized Hardware
The customer’s unique user experience was driven from their access to some very specialized hardware: a horizontally mounted PC with a 40” screen with built in computer vision – a PC “table”. The table enabled the scenario of placing object upon it and having the digital display react in a custom fashion.
To control the specialized hardware required quickly learning the accompanying software development kit. Important questions needed to be answered like the capability and speed of the processing and of the vision object recognition.
Digital Mettle quickly acquired duplicate hardware and undertook a few weeks of rapid R&D work to make sure they could get the most out of what the hardware provided.
Iterating with a global team
The customer’s multimedia team was willing to provide assistance in UI and UX development. They were not familiar with the technologies required by the hardware they had selected. Digital Mettle helped the internal team select and train on designer quality tools for the .NET platform so they could contribute directly to the solution in progress.
The two teams posted daily progress videos to each other so they could each see how the other’s work effected important UX factors like interface responsiveness.
Media Management
With any new presentation system, especially one with unique needs like associating digital assets to real-world objects, media management becomes a key concern. As part of the solution, Digital Mettle delivered new tools for the internal team to use to organize their files and add the new metadata the system would need.
A Solution Becomes a Product
The executive team for the company was so impressed with the results of the effort that they are considering implemented it not as a customer engagement tool, but as a new product to sell to their customers.
The following year the solution was re-developed to be compatible on a wider range of hardware including Windows, Android, and iOS tablets. The solution has been used and improved every year since it was created and Digital Mettle facilitated the handoff to internal IT for ongoing maintenance.